The Way To The Western Sea

Lewis And Clark Across The Continent

January 29, 1989|By KEITH F. MCLOUGHLAND

The broken line on the map of North America begins in Pittsburgh and ends at the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, certain locations are marked: "Sgt. Floyd's Gravesite," "Confrontation with Teton Sioux" and, near a point where we would now place Seattle, "Cape Disappointment."

Those cryptic identifications mark the route - and some of the worst moments - of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, carried out from 1803 to 1806. It was a trek filled with the raw material of great story-telling: adventure, confrontation, crisis, even eventual tragedy. When a story-teller the likes of historian David Lavender recounts the tale, the result is bound to be a treat.

So it is with "The Way to the Western Sea" - the product of a writer one admirer calls "the ultimate authority on Lewis and Clark." Lavender's treatment of this familiar story is so fresh, the reader is fooled into thinking that the great expedition must be the author's personal discovery. It comes as something of a surprise to find a seven-page bibliography appended to the narrative.

Beginning with the negotiations for the Louisiana Territory, Lavender presents President Thomas Jefferson as a shrewd statesman - eager to keep Napoleon at home, and even more eager "to push an American commercial highway" across the continent. Thus, though Jefferson had genuine scientific and geographical interests, his main purpose in creating the Corps of Discovery was the complex and clandestine one of undermining Britain's northwest fur trade. Added to that was a diplomatic mission: "carrying word of the shift in sovereignty to every Indian tribe and foreign trader within reach from the Missouri River."

In this regard, as in virtually all others, the expedition was a smashing success. So is Lavender's book with its finely drawn characterizations, rich style and novelist's sense of the dramatic:

"Rain and hail came down like a volley from the heavens (Clark's smile). As a flash flood of mud and boulders pounded down the narrow ravine toward them, Sacagawea swooped up her baby with one hand and extended the other to Charbonneau, who started to pull her up the precipitous slope to safety - and then froze in terror. Clark shoved frantically from behind. The water was clutching at his waste before he was able to pull himself up beside the others, minus the gun and shot pouch he had instinctively grabbed during the floundering. Tomahawk, umbrella, powder horn and the compass, the only big one the party had, were also gone."

Lavender's narrative is filled with fascinating details and small surprises (like that one about the umbrella!). More to the point, it is also filled with enough action - encounters with hostile Indians, with life-threatening wildlife, with hunger and illness, with implausible landscapes - to fuel half a dozen pulp novels.

But this is no fiction. That bibliography, among other things, attests to the fact that "The Way to the Western Sea," with all of its style and freshness, is popular history of a very high order.